"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

What Amber Phillips has scrawled on the virtual wall deserves to be roundly fisked, FJMed, deconstructed to a atomic level, refuted right down to Phillips' choice of verbs. But life is too short, so let's just grab a few of the high notes. Take a look at Bernie Sanders' tweetstorm this morning, whence comes Phillips' worthless analysis:

Near as I can tell, the good senator bookended three objective, empirical verities of very recent vintage with two salient, if somewhat objective, assertions. He essentially said that a leader who lies -- and this is important -- so flagrantly, and about things that are easily refuted, not only is no leader, but he undermines the credibility of the nation in the eyes of the world, and Sanders provided three fresh examples to support his argument. This is very solid work, in fewer than seven hundred characters, far fewer than the number of helpless pixels Phillips expends in her shameless hackery.

A prominent U.S. senator just described the president of the United States as a frequent and “shameless” liar, a claim that for reasons I'll explain is difficult to prove.

Yeah, except she doesn't explain it at all, except to assume that maybe Fuckface Von Clownstick legitimately does not know the facts regarding the things he asserts. In other words, despite having the facts explained to him over and over and over again by the very media outlet (among many others) for which Amber Phillips haplessly plies her trade, Clownstick may sincerely believe that millions of people voted fraudulently, that his inauguration crowd was record-setting despite all photographic evidence to the contrary, that Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii.

That's why this ultra-tense Democrat-Trump relationship is more than just he-said, she-said politics. Because Senate Democrats can require 60 votes to approve any piece of legislation, they have leverage over Trump and congressional Republicans, who have only 52 members in the Senate. Trump needs at least a handful of Democrats to help him repeal and replace Obamacare. And carry out his plan to restructure the tax code. Or pass a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

Right now, the exact opposite is happening: Democrats are blocking Trump in historic ways, like stalling committee hearings for key Cabinet posts or threatening to filibuster his Supreme Court nominee.

To read this tedious nonsense, you would never guess that we just spent the last eight years watching a Democratic president (who won by margins much larger than that of the current occupant) get kneecapped by the opposition party for no good reason at all, out of sheer obstructionism. But this asshole selects for his cabinet fellow skeevy billionaires and feckless morons who promise to destroy the agencies they have been appointed to lead. This is a strategy, albeit a demented one, employed by someone who has spent the better part of the last two years campaigning on the most toxic lies and corrosive rhetoric in modern memory. But it's the Democrats who are being meeeaan. Hey, fuck you.

Phillips lards the rest of her turd-burglary with weasel phrases such as "Democrats say," as if they were making unsubstantiated claims just to be dicks, as opposed to using facts to respond to someone who is making unsubstantiated claims just to be a dick. Repeated throughout, this serves as a cheap hack-media device to separate the writer from their intrinsic fear of "editorializing," as if this was all just a matter of partisan opinion-mongering.

The whole column is a pile of shit that should be flushed twice, but again what really takes it that extra turd-mile is this butt-nugget near the end:

It's possible Trump believes the allegations he's making, which seem to have surfaced on a conservative news site one of his top aides used to manage. Several top House Republicans haven't brushed off the wiretapping claims, with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, saying he'll look into it.

[emphasis in original]

Lots of things are possible. It's possible that I have a billion dollars in the bank and a twelve-inch cock, which I use on Salma Hayek several times a day. It's possible that the corporeal entity we know as "Donald Trump" is actually two hyperactive children piggy-backed under a trench coat, like trying to sneak into an R-rated movie in a cartoon. It's definitely possible that Amber Phillips should have reread the nonsense she was writing before she sent it in to her editor.

Because Phillips' own logic undermines her own argument. By her logic, this fucking jerkoff is either a pathological liar or the dumbest fucking guy on the planet. Because all of his lies -- and let's stop fucking around here, folks, he's lying and he knows it, he just doesn't give a shit -- have been refuted over and over again. Whether he chooses to read anything besides Breitbart, or watch anything besides Hannity or Fox and Friends, is irrelevant. You can cut a dropout oxy addict in Bumfuck, Ohio some slack for not having their facts straight; it is an existential danger and a complete abdication of responsibility to cut the guy in the Oval Office such slack. Also, Devin Nunes is a shameless douchebag who would probably chug Steve Bannon's pole on the White House lawn if told to do so. [Ed.-- But he'd wait for Jason Chaffetz to finish his turn.]

You might expect more out of a corporate media entity than a cheap reiteration of George Costanza rationales. You would be wrong to have that expectation.

Word of advice to the "legit" media -- the only thing required for you to do your job is that you call people and things what they objectively are. Stop using weasel words and pretzel logic and idiotic false equivalences, especially in what is essentially an opinion column.